The Eye of Ra

by Michael Asher

  I put my glass down and glared. I felt a familiar knotting of anger in my stomach and prepared to say something biting to the old man. Then I took two deep breaths and let the anger drain out with the expelled air. What did it matter what Karlman thought, anyway?

  ‘Thank you, Professor,’ I said, ‘but I didn’t come to discuss my ideas. I came to ask about Howard Carter. How well did you know him?’

  ‘Well enough to know he was a bloody fool,’ Karlman said, still chuckling. ‘He should never have opened Tutankhamen’s tomb. There was a curse on it - Carter and Carnarvon knew that, but they went right on and unsealed the thing and let the furies out of Pandora’s box.’

  ‘How did they know?’

  ‘Carter found a tablet outside the sealed door before he opened it, with an inscription reading: “Death will Slay with Swift Wings all who disturb the sleep of the King.” He was afraid he’d be accused of grave-robbing, and there’d be a fearful hullabaloo, so he got rid of it. But he knew there was a curse all right. There were unseen watchmen in that tomb. They pooh-poohed it and forgot the ancient Egyptians were masters of occult powers for at least five thousand years - time to develop techniques unknown to modern science. That was arrogant, and the arrogance cost Lord Carnarvon his life and almost a couple of dozen others theirs.’

  ‘You mean there were other deaths in connection with Tutankhamen’s tomb?’

  ‘My God, yes. My, you have been keeping your head in the sand, my dear Mr Ross. First off, Carnarvon’s brother Aubrey, a former British intelligence officer, who was with Carnarvon when he opened the sarcophagus, dropped dead while in a state of “temporary insanity”. His sister, Lady Elizabeth Carnarvon, who was also there, died of another mysterious “mosquito bite” — not malaria, note. George Jay Gould, an American millionaire friend of Carnarvon, was struck dead by an “unidentified illness” while in the Valley of the Kings. Woolf Joel, another rich socialite friend of Carnarvon’s, was drowned in the Nile when he tumbled off his yacht at Luxor. Walter Morrison, the Reuters correspondent who’d secretly inveigled himself into the tomb, was found dead in his London club for no obvious reason. The same year, a distinguished British radiologist, Sir Archibald Reid, succumbed to another “unidentified illness” while preparing to X-ray Tutankhamen’s mummy. The same year the professor of Egyptology at the University of Leeds, England, H. G. Evelyn-White, who had worked in the Valley of the Kings, committed suicide, leaving a note stating that there was a curse on him. Two years later, Georges Benedite and Michel Cassanova, two prominent French Egyptologists who had excavated in the Valley of the Kings, dropped dead suddenly. Professor Laffleur, a friend of Howard Carter’s, died the day after entering the tomb. Two of Carter’s assistants, Mace and Carver, died shortly afterwards, and an Egyptian Prince, Ali Fahmi Bey, was shot outside the tomb. In 1929, Richard Bethell, Carter’s personal secretary, was found dead in a flat in London, and his father, Lord Westbury, promptly leapt to his death from a seven-storey building, leaving a note which read: “I really cannot stand any more horrors.” And that’s only a few of them. In all, twenty-two people directly connected with Tutankhamen’s tomb were dead within six years, and almost all of them died under inexplicable circumstances. Statistically, the odds against that are phenomenal. Look at Carnarvon — the first one of the series — he supposedly died of a “mosquito bite”. Now, even in an era without antibiotics, that wasn’t common; everyone who visits the tropics is bitten by mosquitoes at some time. Yet we find his sister dying of the same thing.’

  ‘What about Carter himself, though?’ I asked. ‘He remained spectacularly alive, yet he was the one who’d actually unsealed the tomb.’

  ‘I knew Carter towards the end of his life. He claimed he’d never believed the curse story, but he was a most unhappy man. Miserable as sin. He wished to God he’d never found the tomb. Actually, he and Carnarvon quarrelled bitterly even before they’d opened the last sarcophagus, and weren’t on speaking terms when Carnarvon was taken ill. Carter lived until 1939, but he died a friendless loner. While he was still working in the Valley of the Kings he complained frequently of paralysing attacks of dizziness, physical debilitation, hallucinations and blinding headaches. As soon as he had completed his work on the tomb he became seriously ill and never properly recovered. In the end, Tutankhamen killed him too.’

  ‘Why did he fall out with Carnarvon?’

  ‘The official story was that they disagreed over press coverage and over the ultimate destiny of the treasures. Carnarvon wanted to give the whole story to the London Times. Carter wanted to keep it hush-hush. Carnarvon wanted to take the lion’s share of the treasure home to England but Carter thought it should remain in Egypt.’ I remembered the expressions of mutual distrust on the faces of Carter and Carnarvon in the newspaper photograph Julian had left me.

  ‘Which of them won?’ I enquired.

  ‘Carter did. After Carnarvon died, of course, opposition crumbled. The press was bridled and fed only titbits. And of course the Tutankhamen collection remains in Egypt to this day.’

  ‘Tell me, Professor, did you ever happen to come across a character called Orde Wingate — a young army officer, stationed in Khartoum in the 1930s?’

  For a second, Karlman’s eyes narrowed. He paused as if making an effort to remember. Then he smiled and the atlas of lines on his face reformed into an alternative configuration. ‘We’re talking sixty years ago, Mr Ross. Long before you were even born. It’s awfully hard...Wingate...yes, I think I did run into him. One of those damned Zerzura Club people who tooled about the desert looking for lost cities, with their light aircraft and Model-T Fords. Never had much to do with them myself.’

  ‘Did Wingate ever meet Howard Carter?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know. Carter met a lot of people. He was the hero of the time. Didn’t do him much good, though. He lived his last six years in agony.’

  ‘And you explain all this by a curse?’

  ‘However you define it, yes. The ancient Egyptians themselves regarded the tombs with awe because they believed the astral bodies of the dead lived within them. We in the West dismiss such beliefs because they run contrary to our so-called scientific-rationalist-humanist tradition. That tradition is only five hundred years old, and it is only another set of schemata, Mr Ross, only another set of subjective beliefs. Scientific objectivity is a fallacy. You know Heisenberg’s principle — in an observed system the observer interacts? That spells the end of science, Mr Ross: it pricks the bubble of the whole rationalist myth. Uncertainty. If the observer is always part of the equation, then the observer manipulates the fabric of reality. And if the observer manipulates reality, then what we see out there is really in here.’ He tapped his head with a spiny finger. ‘So we come back full circle to the unconscious mind — the irrational mind. Science pretends that human behaviour can be governed by reason: any glimpse of history will show you what a nonsense that is. In the human unconscious there are occult forces, forces of unbelievable power, capable of swatting aside whole races and populations as if they were flies. Look at the great genocides of this century: Hitler’s Germany, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, the Chinese in Tibet. Do you really think that the death and torture of millions of innocent people could be the product of rationality, Mr Ross? The Egyptians did not subscribe to our rationalist myth, yet they were advanced technologically and highly sophisticated. They had thousands of years to develop powers of which we know nothing. I am utterly convinced that they knew how to concentrate round a mummy certain dynamic forces which are beyond our comprehension. Have you ever heard of Hermes Trismegistus, Mr Ross? The ancient Egyptians were a nation of magicians and sorcerers.’

  Karlman leaned forward. A beam of light caught his eyes, and they gleamed yellow for a moment, like the eyes of a cat. ‘And you know what, my boy?’ he whispered. ‘It’s all starting up again. It’s already started with your friend Dr Cranwell, the mad desert explorer. That’s why you’re really here, isn’t it, Mr Ross. You already suspect there’
s a link between Cranwell’s death and Tutankhamen. You mark my words: Cranwell’s death won’t be the last. Oh yes, it’s all starting up again.’

  I looked at Karlman. The old man’s face was contorted into a horrific mask and there was no mistaking the emotion written there: it was glee.

  I got up. ‘Thanks, Professor,’ I said. ‘I’d better go.’

  ‘So soon. Oh, I’m so sorry. And we were getting along just dandy, weren’t we.’ He darted out a hand and grasped me by the fingers. ‘Don’t be offended by what I said about your ideas, Mr Ross,’ he said. ‘You were head and shoulders above the rest of the sheep. You weren’t there but you were getting warm. What did that rat Rifad give as his excuse for sacking you? Some trifling article or something I expect. That was a pretext, Ross. You found something at Madinat Habu, remember? The Siriun Stela? That’s the real reason they gave you the bullet, not for any third-rate article you wrote.’

  I was appalled by Karlman’s demented expression, by the alarming undercurrents in his talk. I tried to pull away, but his clutch was unexpectedly strong. Karlman leaned over until he was speaking almost directly into my ear. ‘One last word for you before you go, my boy,’ he whispered. ‘Look out for the Eye of Ra.’

  His repellent low chuckling followed me to the door.

  I pushed through crowds of Fellahin and flocks of fat sheep outside Imbaba market, and found a public telephone. I dialled Doc Barrington’s number and almost at once the phone was picked up: ‘Who?’ I heard Doc’s voice demand.

  ‘It’s Jamie,’ I said, ‘I found Aurel Karlman. The guy’s a fruitcake —’

  ‘Jamie?’ Doc cut in, gasping, ‘Jamie, is that you? Where are you?’

  ‘Imbaba. Is anything wrong?’

  ‘Get here at once, Jamie,’ she said, ‘I’ve just had a call from Julian Cranwell.’

  14

  In a way, resurrection is the key to all the great religions. Christ rose from the dead after three days to show that there’s eternal life in God, the Buddhists and Hindus believe that the dead soul is reborn into another life. The ancient Egyptians saw the cosmos as all of one piece and that in each human being there’s part that’s mortal and part that’s an eternal aspect of the whole. It’s the mortal, conscious aspect of you that makes you ‘you’ — Fred, Dick or Sarah — as opposed to anybody else. It’s also that part that dies, while the other part, the immortal aspect, lives on for ever through the web of life. That aspect isn’t ‘you’ as an individual, but an unconscious entity that dwells in darkness, in primeval waters, unaware and unindividuated — a collective, non-sentient force. If you like, the unconscious, immortal you is a tree that grows for ever, while the conscious, mortal you is the leaf. Only individual human consciousness can break out of the darkness by its awareness of being, a quality symbolised in Egyptian myth by the Eye of Ra. Since I reached manhood, I’ve never believed in the survival of personality after death, only survival of the eternal, unconscious aspect of human life. We’d scoffed at the idea of Julian’s resurrection, but now, it seemed, he’d risen from the dead after three days, and the Eye of Ra was open.

  The peephole twinkled, and Doc opened the door cautiously. She was distraught and pale, her eyes shot with red. She closed the door and held me tightly. ‘It was him,’ she sobbed. ‘I swear it was Julian’s voice on the phone.’

  ‘OK. OK, Doc. Let’s sit down and talk about this.’

  I put my arm around her and led her to the balcony. She sat down heavily, sniffed, and dried her eyes with a tissue. I went to the fridge and poured us both a glass of iced water from the carafe. Doc took the drink gratefully.

  ‘How do you know it was Julian?’

  ‘One, because it sounded like Julian. You know, that kind of nasal intonation Julian had — came from blocked sinuses. And that touch of Yorkshire.’

  ‘Cumbria.’

  ‘Whatever. It was unmistakable. Two, he said he was Julian. “Doc,” he said, “it’s me, Julian. Don’t be scared. There’s been a mistake. I’ve got to talk to Ross. Is he there?” — you know how he always called you “Ross”, the formal English way, as if you were always his apprentice. He asked if you were there. I said “No” and he said “Tell him to meet me tonight at the Great Pyramid: he knows the place. Just past moonrise, seven thirty, and I’ll explain everything. Tell him there’s been a mistake. I’ll explain everything tonight. Sorry Doc, got to go. Bye,” and that was it. Jamie, I swear it was him.’

  ‘OK, but if it was, who was that I saw at the pyramids?’

  ‘Someone who looked like Julian —’

  — And who had Julian’s passport. If it wasn’t Julian, someone was trying to make damned sure I believed that Julian was dead, and was ready to go as far as bumping off a Julian look-alike.’

  ‘Perhaps you weren’t the object of the exercise. Perhaps whoever it was wanted to persuade the world that Julian was dead, and if you were convinced, then everyone else would be.’

  ‘Who would have a motive for doing that?’

  ‘Julian would. He was in trouble. He was afraid for his life. He had something others wanted, maybe the Kolpos translation of the directions to Zerzura, maybe the ushabtis. Maybe he staged his own death in order to escape whoever or whatever was after him.’

  ‘And whacked an innocent man who happened to look like him? Hardly Julian!’

  ‘We don’t know the victim was murdered. The police said it was a heart attack. What if Julian just came across a heart-attack victim who happened to look like him and substituted him.’

  ‘Doc, that implies so many coincidences, it’s crazy, but it’s not the craziest thing I’ve heard today. Karlman told me quite seriously that Carter and Carnarvon unleashed powerful psychic forces when they unlocked Tutankhamen’s tomb — forces responsible for the death of Carnarvon and twenty odd others. He said it was all starting up again and implied these same dark forces had killed Julian.’

  ‘Ahriman,’ Doc said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Dark forces — Ahriman — the Enemy of Light. It’s a term from the Avesta, the Holy Text of the Zoroastrians dating back to about 600 B C . Steiner borrowed it in the early decades of this century. He was a clairvoyant who maintained that there was a secret battle going on between these unseen demonic forces — Ahriman — and the “Cohorts of Michael”: the Forces of Light. He wrote that the objective of Ahriman was to take over the stream of human evolution and to merge with it, developing a whole new species which would be devoid of all the features we value most.’

  ‘You mean like lying, murdering and cheating?’

  ‘Cynicism doesn’t become you, darling. All hocus-pocus aside, it looks as though Julian could still be alive and kicking.’

  ‘Perhaps we’ll find out tonight.’

  ‘If you’re going to meet him, I’m coming with you.’

  ‘No, Doc. It might be dangerous. I don’t want you getting involved.’

  ‘Listen to the Great White Knight. I was doing surveillance jobs before you were out of nappies. It’s about time I got off my fat backside and got into the field again. There’s been too much sitting around since Ronnie died — and anyway, you need back-up on this.’

  It was almost sunset when Doc motored me towards Giza in her old Peugeot 504 station-wagon. As we crawled at a snail’s pace up the long boulevard of the Shari’ al-Ahram, heavy with shadows, I watched the massed crowds on the pavements, the sea of cars almost bumper to bumper, the faceless apartment blocks and hotels, and remembered why the Hawazim hate the city. They call it ‘the place where trails run out’. In the desert you can read everything on the surface, just like reading a book. In the city it’s all noise and smells and perversions, and the trails get confused. When I was a boy I knew Hawazim who’d never been in a city in their lives. Some had been once, and never wanted to go back. Some of them had never even been in a motor-car. I’ve often wondered what it would have been like to stay with the Hawazim, to really have been one of them. When my mother disappeared, my fa
ther was so cut up he just wanted to get out of the country. He took me off to England and I became a proper little English public schoolboy. Of course, I was never really accepted, and in a way I couldn’t blame the other boys. I had strange habits. It took me years to get completely used to living inside all the time, for instance, and once or twice they caught me kipping on the school playing-fields. It was always an effort for me to remember not to eat with my hands. The irony was that I wanted nothing more than to be like them — I wanted to be Mister-Middle-England, with an Oxford drawl, blue eyes and golden hair, instead of this dark-haired, coffee-coloured stranger with a pierced upper ear. I wanted to be the kid who won the Victor Ludorum shield for athletics and played rugger for the First XV, not ‘that wog’ or ‘that bloody Gyppo’. Children are more bigoted than their parents, or perhaps they’re just less hypocritical. At first I got pushed around. I just took it, up to a certain level, and then one day, after the form bully locked me in the cricket shed, I exploded. I got hold of a cricket bat, smashed a window, jumped out and went straight for him. He was a big fellow, a rugger player and all that, but he wasn’t expecting the fury — or the cricket bat. I bashed him with it until his arm was broken. ‘I was absolutely astonished,’ the headmaster told my father when he explained to him why I was to be expelled. ‘James always seemed such a quiet boy.’ It was lucky the other boy’s parents weren’t pressing charges, he said, otherwise I might have ended up in borstal. The experience had such a devastating effect on me that as an undergraduate I took up the out-of-fashion sport of boxing, to sublimate what a psychiatrist called my ‘latent anger’, and it was for the same reason I learned deep-breathing techniques at a yoga class. For all that, though, I’d found out something valuable about conflict — that it’s not how big you are that counts.